From buds to flowers: the blossoming of constructions in child language

In the course of their development, children make their way along successive transitory systems with their own internal coherence. We will present the paths they follow from gestures and first words to complex constructions embedded in their dialogic context, developing both linguistic, conversational and social skills necessary to full mastery of language.

Our data shows that the use of grammatical forms is irregular in terms of canonical syntax but not random, and corresponds to particular semantic/pragmatic features.